March 3rd, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
Streaming service Paramount+ launches this Thursday March 4th with the brand new CG SpongeBob prequel series Kamp Koral. Nickelodeon’s beloved sponge is 10 years old, joining pals Patrick and Sandy at summer camp. Squidward is their counselor. Mr. Krabs is the camp director (taking care of baby Pearl in his office). Other familiar faces pop-in, along with some new characters.
But here’s what remains the same: the incredible voice cast and the very talented crew. Co-executive producers Vincent Waller and Marc Ceccarelli have worked on SpongeBob for years, and they’re thrilled to bring this new series to audiences of ALL ages. Waller and Ceccarelli stress that even though the characters are younger, Kamp Koral wasn’t simply made for little kids.
Jackson Murphy: You two have been a core part of the SpongeBob world for so long. Vince, when did you know that this was the right time to do a SpongeBob prequel series?
Vincent Waller: (laughs) When did I know? Actually I think I really didn’t fully know until I saw the results come back – until I saw it in real world time what was gonna come back CG wise. Just because I had seen other CG things not go so well on television budgets. When I saw what our crew was able to put together at the overseas studio, I relaxed greatly.
JM: That’s good. It’s a fully CG animated prequel series. Marc, it’s a very cool CG style. What was the trial and error process that you and the team experienced in making that CG look work?
Marc Ceccarelli: The process was fun and like Vincent said slightly nerve-wracking. This whole thing was fast-tracked. We did it all very quickly. When the CG team came in and asked us what style we wanted, we had definite opinions about the types of styles that we thought work well for the show. We picked them out and we went forward with them. But the way CG works, you don’t really see proof of the final concept until the final renders come in of scenes that were boarded months ago. We were way far down the line on the process before we actually finally saw what the final look was like. Luckily it turned out like we thought it would.
VW: Going in, literally in some of the first storyboards, we were getting a lot of people saying, “Oh. I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you’ll be able to make the rig that will do that. I don’t think they can get his mouth open that big. I don’t think they can get him at that angle and look like that.” But what they didn’t realize was we had a crew full of people who have been working on CG shows where they put a lot of work in their stuff and they really only get almost no emotion out of them in the series because they just don’t expect as much from them as we do from SpongeBob. And our crew was suddenly excited to figure out how they could make the technology do that without making it super heavy-rigged or on a movie budget.
JM: You make it happen, and SpongeBob is so expressive. So you absolutely needed those emotions. It’s interesting you say that this was fast-tracked. Obviously the “Kamp Koral” concept is in the new SpongeBob movie, which I’ve also had the chance to see and is a lot of fun. Was this series fast-tracked because maybe [executives] wanted the series and the movie to time together perfectly for releasing them?
MC: That was definitely part of the consideration. But also everything in television, just in my opinion, goes way too fast. The pipelines of television are just barreling forward. We have a high level of quality that we expect out of our shows at SpongeBob that it’s always a chore to work against the tight deadlines that television demands to try and get as many bells and whistles as we can get into our shows. There is a Kamp Koral element in the movie, and I’m sure the network really wanted to have them kind of line up and come out around the same time.
VW: And it made our research and development to be certainly fast-tracked. I kin it to designing, sewing and trying to put on your clothes as you’re going down the sidewalk. But it all worked out well.
JM: (laughs) That’s a lot, but you did it! Vince, what were some of the challenges you discovered in making younger versions of these beloved characters that everyone has known for more than 20 years?
VW: Designing them so that they looked young but not too young. But I actually think the main challenge was just, “Were the voices gonna work?” We didn’t want to change actors. We didn’t want to have children actors. SpongeBob doesn’t just hit one level of emotional content that’s just written on the page. We usually have sometimes three or four meanings in a sentence and three or four different levels of what is funny. And we really needed our usual crew, who understand all of these things – who have been working on the show for 20 years – to translate that for us.
MC: Something that we really wanted to avoid with this series is the whole baby spinoff trope where you age down your characters for a preschool audience. We know we didn’t want to do that. We wanted the same audience, so we felt like a big part of that would be keeping our voice actors from the original series in the show. We could do the same kinds of more complicated emotional humor that we do on “SpongeBob”.
JM: You needed that comedic timing, and it’s so great that you’ve brought the main cast in. Marc, were they surprised at first when they heard about this concept of the series and you guys saying, “We want you to come on and voice the younger versions of these characters”?
MC: Oh, I think they were all excited to just keep the continuity going and keep the characters’ integrity intact. They were all for it. They were all really into it.
VW: They had the same trepidation we did. They didn’t want it to skew too young. But once they saw the scripts that were coming through… And then when they actually started seeing the finished stuff coming back doing ADR, their minds were blown and they were very happy they jumped in with both feet.
MC: All of them are really good actors, so they were able to inhabit these younger characters. A few of them we had to nudge a little bit with pitching. But you have to be really careful with using pitching because if you go just even one semitone too much, it starts to sound like a chipmunk. We just nudged a few of the voice actors that have much deeper, adult voices.
JM: Were you guys working on the main “SpongeBob” series and new episodes that have come out recently and this series simultaneously?
VW: We were kind of leapfrogging from thing to thing, but as always in animation there’s a lot of overlap and now there’s a whole lot of overlap.
MC: It was also kind of easier to do it that way because we were able to keep our same writers that we’re familiar with. We didn’t have to start from scratch on the new project. We had our same writers.
VW: [Not] explaining what the heart of the show is to new people.
MC: It’s always very difficult.
JM: Keeping that stability. A lot of people got to see about six minutes of footage during Nickelodeon’s recent telecast of their NFL game. The scenes are from an episode with a lot of zany action and movement. Vince, how did it feel… to have it play during Halftime of a big NFL game?
VW: It was great fun. I’m not a huge football fan, but my wife yelled from the other room, “HEY!” And I was like, “Oh yeah! Great! It looks cool!”
JM: And Marc, this is not the first time we’ve seen SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward in a camping setting. Of course, we have “The Camping Episode”, which is a classic. Are there some subtle references to “The Campfire Song Song” or SeaBears in “Kamp Koral”?
MC: You’ll definitely be seeing SeaBears. There will be sea bunnies. Lots of urchins. A lot more wildlife. I can’t say anything to the other question. But definitely SeaBears will be making many appearances.
JM: Okay. “The Campfire Song Song” is a classic for my generation. We really appreciate that. Vince, when people come up to you or they ask you about working on “SpongeBob”, is there an episode or an element of the series that people are most interested in learning about?
VW: Oh, wow. People are always interested in the process. But really the most feedback I get from adults, at least, is “Thank Yous” from Dads and Moms saying “Thank you for making this smart enough that I can watch it without feeling like my day is being ruined.” That they actually have things to laugh at and enjoy the show as much as their kids do. Everybody has their favorites, as far as the favorites, and I’m always surprised. Squidward and Patrick are huge favorites. People just get focused on certain characters. I know people who ride around with the characters’ little dolls in their cars of whichever one is their favorite.
JM: Isn’t it amazing that in your third decade of being a part of this show that the universe is expanding more and more. Would you have thought that even 10 years ago that it could get as big as it is?
VW: Honestly, no. There was a point where we were working on the show that if any script, storyboard or anything veered away from just focusing on SpongeBob, we would get notes for, “Where’s SpongeBob? Where’s SpongeBob? We haven’t seen SpongeBob in at least three and a half seconds.” But at some point, the research shows that everybody… people like A LOT of the characters. And they’re really happy to follow any of the other characters through their day to see what they’re doing – with just a sprinkling of SpongeBob.
MC: We started experimenting with that over the last five years: doing more episodes that were focusing on the side characters. It opened so much new material for us and new kinds of stories we could tell.
JM: I’ve noticed that with the recent episodes as well. “Kamp Koral” is kicking off Paramount+. What do you think that says about SpongeBob’s importance and significance right now in entertainment and for this streaming service?
MC: Everybody needs to laugh.
VW: We can’t weigh something’s importance. We just try to give them something to laugh at.
MC: And I’m glad that people are still into what we do because we put so much into it. Everybody works so hard on the crew to make this show, and we all love the characters so much. We all feel really lucky every day to get to work on one of the shows that’s actually an all ages, really fun show where comedy is the most important aspect of the show. Being funny is our number one goal on the show, as opposed to being pedantic or any of those types of things you see a lot in children’s television. We’re just really happy every day that we get to make stuff that we love and share it.
VW: My wife said… and this is just with me on Zoom meetings… “All I hear coming out of your room is laughter.”
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